Welcome

And so it came to pass that you, gentle reader, found your way to my corner of the internet. Welcome. I am Adam Shaftoe-Durrant, and this, obviously, is my website. Here you will find my blog, a selection of my favourite essays and reviews, and some of my audio projects. But who am I, and why should you care about any of this? Allow me to summarize my CV.

For six years I wrote and edited a review and cultural criticism website called The Page of Reviews. During that time, I wrote near to a thousand reviews, essays, think pieces, and straight-up rants. Along the way, I stumbled into work as a film and TV critic for GuysNation.com and a brief stint as the Games Editor for Dirge Magazine. If that wasn’t enough, I’ve also read mountains of slush for Daily Science Fiction and the Friends of the Merril Short Story Competition.

Though I picked up a pen to write fiction, specifically science fiction, a lot of my recent work has been in criticism. At first, I started writing reviews because it was easier to talk about other people’s work than sort out my own. Somewhere along the line criticism became something more to me. Criticism offers a chance to engage in a dialogue with an author and their work. Alternatively, it’s a way to hold a mirror up to society and take apart the things people hold dear – I still don’t know why everybody likes Guardians of the Galaxy and is seemingly obvious to its nature as a love letter to the police state. And then there are the days when a review says more about the critic than anything else. Case in point, my review of Ex Machina. Did I ever make a mess of that one.

My goal with this website is to share all of those insights while also giving myself a place to house whatever new projects happen to cross my mind.